Concerted baseball effort pays big in Hoosier State
WESTFIELD, Ind. — Abutting the nation’s largest youth sports complex are several as-yet undeveloped lots, a few houses and a nursing home but mostly wide expanses of corn stalks and soybean plants.
This Midwestern farmland encloses 31 all-purpose fields for soccer and lacrosse and a 26-ballfield sprawl of Little League and high school diamonds. The latter seems suited for major league spring training but whose primary tenant is instead the Indiana Bulls, an elite travel team that attracted 100 pro scouts and college coaches for a showcase last summer.
“The whole thing feels pretty ‘Field of Dreams-ish,’” Butler University baseball coach Steve Farley said.
Indeed, Indiana has a new bumper crop: big league ballplayers.
While fieldhouses around the state are warmed by crowds gearing up for the 106th state basketball tournament - pairings are released Sunday - more than two dozen of the state’s favorite sons are finding their way to Arizona and Florida for spring training as camps open this week.
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In 2015, 24 Indiana natives appeared in a major league game, including St. Louis Cardinals starter Lance Lynn, new Blue Jays reliever Drew Storen, Minnesota Twins pitching prospect Alex Meyer and new Seattle Mariners first baseman Adam Lind; two first-round draft picks were born and raised there, too.
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Indiana is the 16th most populous state, but is punching above its weight with more major leaguers than the states ranked sixth, ninth and 11th-through-15th in size: Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia, Washington, Massachusetts and even warm-weather Arizona, which had only 13 in MLB — barely half Indiana’s haul, thanks to the Bulls and other leading in-state travel ball programs such as the Prospects and Mustangs.
That Indiana has become an unexpected hotbed of baseball prospects owes to a sporting culture, provincial youth sports, travel teams developing and exposing latent talent and the example set by a few Hoosier pioneers.
The Bulls, in particular, are leading the way. On their three 18-year-old teams, 33 of their 45 players have already committed to a college baseball program.
The provenance of much of the Bulls’ funding, executive director and stature can be traced back to a single origin: Jasper native and charter Bulls player Scott Rolen, who since has been an ambassador, benefactor, recruiter and instructor for Indiana baseball.
“Without him,” Bulls co-founder Dave Taylor said, “we would have really struggled.”
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In the beginning
The Indiana entrant in the 1991 AAU under-16 Junior Olympics took a detour from its bus trip south to the tournament in Tallahassee to play an exhibition game against an 18-year-old American Legion team in Jasper, Ind.
“This kid comes up and hits a ball over the fence, over two school buses and into a parking lot,” recalled Taylor, who coached that Junior Olympic team, “and I’m like, ‘Where’s that guy going to college?’ (The other coach) said, ‘He’s only a sophomore.’
“It was Scott Rolen.”
Taylor, who played baseball at Wabash College, said he had only seen a swing like that once before: Evansville native Don Mattingly, against whom Taylor competed in high school. Rolen would homer in his second at bat, too, and Taylor — a litigator by trade who’s used to persuasive arguments — convinced the young player’s parents that he should join the team on the Florida-bound bus the next morning.
With Rolen and a future Mississippi State shortstop, Indiana finished eighth out of 48, even beating teams from Georgia and Texas. California won the tournament, and its coach told Taylor his team had been playing together for six years with more than 150 games per year. “Well, that might make a difference,” said Taylor, understating the realization.
On the drive back, Taylor and the other coaches began concocting what would become the Indiana Bulls. The inaugural club had two future big leaguers — Rolen, the seven-time All-Star and eight-time Gold Glover, and six-year center fielder Todd Dunwoody — and has had 121 drafted players in 25 years.
Statewide, in the nine seasons since 2007, 31 Indiana natives have made their big league debut compared to only 29 debuts in the previous 12 years, 1995-2006. Also since 2007, the Bulls have developed seven first- or second-round draft choices — Terre Haute North catcher T.J. Collett could be the eighth this June — while the rest of the state has also produced seven in that time.
Current pros such as Reds catcher Tucker Barnhart, free-agent pitcher Tommy Hunter (with the Cubs in 2015) and Storen all spoke glowingly of Rolen’s example and support. Rolen began giving back to the Bulls long before signing an eight-year, $90-million contract — and even before winning the 1997 NL Rookie of the Year.
According to Taylor, Rolen began financially supporting the Bulls even as a minor leaguer, in the early days donating as much as a quarter of the Bulls’ annual budget and covering overruns. As importantly, Rolen would return as a guest instructor — which he still does — and advise the non-profit’s board of directors. He’s also been known to show up unannounced wearing flip flops in the Bulls dugout, as he did at a tournament in Georgia years ago. Many former players regularly visit the current Bulls.
“It definitely gives me inspiration that guys from Indiana can go that far and make a difference in young kids’ dreams and lives,” said Batesville High junior catcher Zach Britton, a Louisville commit.
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An uptick in quality
Indiana is home to the Indy 500, the NFL’s Colts and Notre Dame football, but its culture-defining sports has always been basketball, from red-sweatered Bobby Knight as Indiana coach to Larry Bird’s garage-hung hoop in French Lick to Reggie Miller’s far-flung marksmanship with the Pacers to Jimmy Chitwood’s hardwood heroics in Hoosiers.
Clint Barmes, a 13-year big league shortstop who played for the Padres in 2015, grew up in Vicennes where everyone idolized high school basketball players — including Rolen, four years older and a star at rival Jasper High. Those games took place in packed gymnasiums, compared to the scene at high school ballfields.
“There were probably 20-to-25 fans in the stands, and the majority of them, if not all of them, were parents,” Barmes said.
Around the same time that the Rolen-led Indiana team notched its top-10 finish at the AAU junior nationals, however, a 12-year-old team from small-town Vincennes featuring a young Clint Barmes reached the national Bambino World Series. In 1999, Brownsburg won the first of three straight Little League state titles and made two trips to Williamsport, Pa., for the Little League World Series.
Many of those three Brownsburg Little League teams — including Lynn and Storen — formed the nucleus of a 2005 Brownsburg High team that became Indiana’s second undefeated state champion, joining a Mattingly-led Reitz Memorial (Evansville) team in 1978.
Incidentally, during one five-year span, overlapping at Brownsburg with Lynn and Storen were Barnhart; Gordon Hayward, a forward on the NBA’s Utah Jazz; Chris Jones, a defensive tackle for the NFL’s New England Patriots; Chris Estridge, an All-American soccer player at Indiana who briefly played in the North American Soccer League; and Mark Titus, a walk-on Ohio State basketball player later hired to write at Grantland after the success of his popular writing at Club Trillion.
All high school sports — and especially basketball — are of great community importance in Indiana. Most towns have only one high school; this, Titus theorizes, rallies community support and motivates young athletes.
“Playing basketball for Brownsburg was the one thing I wanted to do in my life,” he said. “I didn’t think beyond that.”
That’s not to say he didn’t play other sports, too. He was the starting quarterback of the high school football team and was a standout Little League player, about which he self-deprecatingly notes, “I was good at baseball insofar as I hit puberty before everyone else.” But he wasn’t ready for the next level.
“The culture of the Indiana Bulls and how good Brownsburg was at baseball just terrified me, because those guys were really good,” Titus said. “They take this really seriously.”
Given the increased specialization among youth, few play multiple sports by their later years of high school. The Bulls began indoor baseball practice earlier this month.
Brian O’Connor, coach of defending College World Series champion Virginia, previously was an assistant coach at South Bend’s Notre Dame and has seen the changes firsthand. Last year, he recruited the first player from Indiana in U.Va. program history: a right-handed pitcher, Grant Sloan, who previously played for the Bulls and more recently for Illinois-based Prairie Gravel.
“Clearly, there has been — I think in the last 10 to 15 years — a big uptick in the quality of play and the depth of the play in the state,” O’Connor said.
Sloan is the grandson of Jerry Sloan, the longtime coach of the NBA’s Utah Jazz, and the son of Brian Sloan, who won a national title playing for Knight at IU. O’Connor notes that, at 6-5, Grant Sloan would have to be an expert shooter to have a professional future in hoops, whereas “in baseball he looks like a pretty physical, impressive looking pitcher.”
“Now that kid is getting opportunities in baseball whereas, 20 years ago, that player in the state of Indiana in the summer wasn’t playing travel baseball, he was working out with all his buddies playing hoops the whole time,” O’Connor said.
The Bulls have a 6-3 lefty, Carmel High junior Tommy Sommer, who didn’t allow a single run in 45 innings of elite competition last summer. He committed to Indiana last fall after considering Arizona State, Miami, Ole Miss and Notre Dame. His father, Juergen Sommer, competed in two World Cups as a backup goalkeeper for the U.S.
“Basketball will probably always rule the state, just because of the history that it has, but a lot of kids are starting to pick up baseball,” Tommy Sommer said, “and the Bulls, the Prospects and a lot of these programs are really bringing along some really good talent.”
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Indiana travel teams now routinely participate in national tournaments in Florida, Georgia, Ohio and beyond.
“When we started in ’91, being from Indiana and being a baseball player, you might as well be from Alaska,” Taylor said. “You had no chance to be seen.”
An August 2004 showcase in Arlington, Texas, was loaded with national top-100 prospects, yet the Indiana Bulls more than held their own against powerhouse travel clubs from Florida and Texas.
“Everyone on those teams was wondering, ‘How is this team from Indiana winning these games?’” recalled Mark Storen, Drew’s father. “And we as parents were trying to figure out, ‘How are we winning these games?’”
Little did anyone know then that the pitchers in the Bulls’ starting rotation — Storen, Lynn, Hunter and Josh Lindblom — were all future big leaguers.
Now, many elite teams come to Indiana.
Orange construction cones are ubiquitous north of Indianapolis, where the suburban communities are seeing significant growth. About seven years ago, Westfield mayor Andy Cook spearheaded a push for his town to join the boom with its own industry.
“Westfield was a sprawling residential bedroom on the growth edge of Indianapolis,” Cook said. “Not much identity, nothing really to center around.”
In order to build community, support the burgeoning youth sports scene and develop an economic plan, he pushed for the $45-million development of Grand Park to take advantage of the $7-billion youth sports industry. (It’s such a massive facility that it never would be trusted to the Parks & Rec department of fictional Pawnee, Ind.)
Cook said that the park, in its second year, received 1.6 million visits, which poured an estimated $50 million into the local economy; the park's budget broke even, too. Three hotels are ready to break ground, as are restaurants, shops and a medical-care facility. A 370,000-square-foot indoor sports complex and event center is scheduled to open in July while a privately-built eight-court basketball complex opened nearby in January.
Once again, youth sports have proven a vital part of life in Indiana.
“It’s a part of our heritage, almost,” Cook said.
The Bulls became stakeholders and operators of the baseball and softball fields, which they use and also rent out for tournaments and college teams looking to practice on the artificial fields early in the spring. (Cook is the uncle of former Bull and current Cleveland Indians reliever Joe Thatcher.)
“The whole basis for the Indiana Bulls is to give kids a platform to showcase their abilities,” executive director Dan Held said.
That platform consists of both better development and better visibility. One begets the other for young players to take advantage of the opportunities at increasingly essential recruiting showcases.
Held played nine years of minor league and independent ball, including three as Rolen’s teammate in the Phillies system. While Held peaked in Class AAA, Rolen went on to play 17 big league seasons, winning eight Gold Gloves, reaching seven All-Star teams, smacking 2,077 hits and retiring in 2012 at the end of a career that could earn him election to the Baseball Hall of Fame after he’s eligible in 2017.
The two best friends reunited with the St. Louis Cardinals in 2003 — Rolen as their third baseman, Held as a bullpen assistant coach — and won the 2006 World Series. After the 2007 season, however, Held was looking to settle down with his family; Rolen referred him to the Bulls, who were looking to hire an executive director. (Rolen did not respond to interview requests made through intermediaries.)
Held brought professional coaching experience to supplement what the players receive in the short high school season and, in his tenure, the program more than tripled from seven teams to 23, including a junior level.
The Bulls attracted a corporate sponsor in LIDS, an Indiana-based company known for its hats and caps.
“They’ve given us more money than you could ever justify because they love kids and they love the game, and they’re based here,” Taylor said.
The Bulls’ bylaws stipulate that only Indiana residents can participate, which may seem extraneous until one realizes the increasingly cutthroat world of travel ball that’s mimicking sneaker-sponsored AAU basketball programs that play a national schedule with a national roster.
White Sox Midwest crosschecker Mike Shirley, who is based in Indiana and runs a private baseball training facility there, has seen baseball become more of a priority; its conversion into a year-round sport has helped these players develop the necessary tools and instincts at an earlier age.
Many Indiana big leaguers, particularly at the beginning of this wave, still needed stints in college ball to further refine their games, but the gap between high school players in the South and the Midwest is lessening.
“The skill set has drastically changed over the last few years,” Shirley said. “These kids get out and they play against the best competition now. It has become more of a global game, including the Midwest kids and Indiana.
“It has helped these kids find their place in the game and realize, ‘You know what, I can be a major leaguer.’”
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